Creation of New Variable from Long Variable

[Muhammad Arslan Iqbal]

Hello Everyone,

I am currently working on a "long" variable of 9 digits and want to make a new variable consisting of first 4 digits of long variable. I used the following command where x is the long variable and y is new first four element variable:

gen id=string(x)
gen y=substr(id,1,4)

However, i am getting decimals whereas the original long variable do not have decimals example:
for x=110100101
i am getting y = 1.10
whereas it want is 1101

Please Help. Thanks in advance.

Regards

[Joseph Coveney]

The function string() will use the default numerical formatting for a long number, which is scientific notation. To get around that, explicitly format the string conversion by using the optional second argument to the string() function.

.ÿsetÿobsÿ1
numberÿofÿobservationsÿ(_N)ÿwasÿ0,ÿnowÿ1

.ÿgenerateÿlongÿxÿ=ÿ110100101

.ÿgenerateÿstrÿidÿ=ÿstring(x,ÿ"%09.0f")

.ÿgenerateÿstrÿyÿ=ÿsubstr(id,ÿ1,ÿ4)

.ÿlist,ÿnoobs

ÿÿ+------------------------------+
ÿÿ|ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿxÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿidÿÿÿÿÿÿyÿ|
ÿÿ|------------------------------|
ÿÿ|ÿ110100101ÿÿÿ110100101ÿÿÿ1101ÿ|
ÿÿ+------------------------------+

.

See

help string()

for details.

[Muhammad Arslan Iqbal]

Dear Joseph Coveney, thank you so much for the detailed explanation. It was really helpful, i learned a lot and the problem is resolved.